Chapter Four I
“There, isn’t she sweet?” said Cornelia to Robert, as she put the last touch to a pomegranate sash.
She was referring to Janet, whom she had costumed with all her artistic cunning as a sort of gypsy Carmen. The night of the Outlaws’ ball was at hand; and Cornelia’s flat, number fifteen of the Lorillard model tenements, was the rendezvous for several of the maskers.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” insisted Cornelia, pitching her languid voice high. She pointed proudly to her handiwork (rather than to its wearer), for she was determined to have it admired by all who stood near.
“She is charming, and her voice is beautiful,” said Robert, in cool dispassionate appraisal.
“No one ever called my voice beautiful before!” said Janet, with unfeigned delight, in spite of the scientific detachment of Robert’s tone.
“I shall make you conscious of all your attractions, if you’ll give me time,” added Robert, with much more fervor than before.
“Ought we to be conscious of our attractions?” asked Janet dubiously, for in the Barr environment it was bad form to call attention to anything but detractions.
The immemorial Barr practice bound members of the same family to make the worst of one another’s good qualities.
“Decidedly,” answered Robert. “A wise man should take care to know his good points no less than his bad points, precisely as he takes care to know his assets as well as his liabilities.”
“Yes, leave it to Cato,” cried Cornelia mockingly. She had a nickname for each of her friends. “He’ll tell you all about yourself, until your soul will cease to seem your own. He’ll beautify you—”
“Oh, if he only will!” cut in Janet, with one of her fluent graceful gestures which it was a rare delight merely to see. “I can stand no end of that.”
“He’ll beautify you—morally, my dear,” concluded Cornelia. “His conversation is so improving. He re-creates people in his own image. It’s his specialty.”
Janet’s fine gray eyes narrowed to a hostile glance.
“It’s my mother’s specialty, too,” she said, coldly.
“Now, look here—” cried Robert, springing up from his chair in impetuous protest.
He had good reason to know how unflattering the comparison was. Before he had a chance to say more, Cornelia hurriedly interposed.
“There’s one important difference, Araminta,” she said. “Your mother believes that beauty is simply goodness; Cato believes that goodness is simply wisdom. He’ll turn you into a likeness of Minerva, with your wonderful raven locks metamorphosed into hissing feminist serpents.”
The outer door opened and Mazie Ross burst in attired as Salome and looking as wicked and tempting as if she were a bacchante straight from the Venusberg.
“Hello, hasn’t Carmen got her war paint on yet?” she called out, frowning on the group.
It was a pretty tableau she beheld. Robert, with folded arms, stood before the two young women, posed for a tremendous vindication. Cornelia, kneeling at her charge’s feet, was absorbed in a final adjustment of the skirt; Janet, with outstretched arms, had just wheeled a full circle in response to her friend’s touch. The two women were a picturesque pair, Cornelia’s golden hair and alabaster skin, vitalized by the excitement, forming a vivid contrast to Janet’s darker coloring.
“Please page the olive complexion and the Castilian nose,” continued Mazie, in a merciless illumination of the favorite’s two weak points.
Janet certainly lacked the challenging physical beauty that makes men forget the mental limitations of an Emma Hamilton or a Mme. de Recamier. Not that she was poor in physical charm. Far from it. She was straight and slender, with waving black hair, an exquisite complexion, and expressive gray eyes. Hers was a face that sobered naturally into thoughtful sympathy and softened readily into merriment or gentleness. True, her features lacked a chiseled perfection, (if that is perfection). But it was not for her body but for her spirit that she both craved and inspired love.
“Well, what’s the big delay?” asked Mazie, flouncing somewhat impatiently to the covered washtubs on which she perched herself in such a way as to advertise extensively her new and pretty underthings.
“Cato is about to exalt us to rare moral heights,” said Cornelia, resuming her scrutiny of the costume of Carmen.
“She thinks I’m a hard-shelled Puritan,” said Robert, appealing to Mazie for support. “Do you agree with her?”
“Oh, give us a cigarette and stop your spoofing,” said Mazie, who had a dread of high-flown talk. “I’m surprised that Rob’s parson poses take you in, Cornelia. Believe me, he’s just like other men when you get him alone on a starry night.”
Robert blushed, Janet’s two rows of long lashes parted wider, and Cornelia gave a queer coloratura laugh. But Mazie’s satisfaction at securing the spotlight was short lived; somehow or other, Janet speedily became the center of attention again.
II
Other Lorillarders bound for the Outlaws’ ball now began to pass in and out of Cornelia’s flat. They were mostly young men and women who represented the various social strata found in the Kips Bay tenements. They brought with them gayety, laughter and high spirits, and spent their time circulating boisterously through the apartment, gossiping on the coming event, and comparing notes on the glamor and glitter of costumes modeled upon every conceivable suggestion of history, legend or myth.
Janet was thrilled with the excitement, the infectious spirits and the easy camaraderie. She noticed that there was no chaperonage or standing on ceremony whatever, and she was struck with the entire absence of self-consciousness between the sexes. Young men and women went in and out as they pleased, helped themselves to Cornelia’s ice box and piano as fancy dictated, and bantered, flirted, kissed, or exchanged partners without stint or scruple. On the face of it, all concerned seemed in full accord with the scheme of “what’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is everybody’s.”
Nor could she help contrasting these cheerful faces, this genial abandon, this entire lifting of social constraint, with the gloomy looks, circumscribed permissions, and moral strait-jacketings of her Brooklyn home. With all their faults, Cornelia Covert and Mazie Ross appeared to suggest happiness and freedom as much as Mrs. Barr and Emily suggested gloom and repression. And the model tenements lost nothing in the comparison by having all the attraction of novelty. If at that minute, Janet had had to choose between a Paradise of Barrs on the one hand, and the flesh, the devil and the model tenements on the other, it is not to the Paradise of Barrs that she would have given the palm.
While Janet met Cornelia’s friends in turn, and gave the men amongst them a new sensation on account of her artless candor, Mazie coquetted freely with the successive males that fluttered around her and displayed unlimited skill in extricating herself from sundry intemperate advances. Growing tired of this sport, she pushed her last admirer brutally off the tubs and said:
“Cornelia, what’s the matter with Claude? He should have shown up ages ago.”
“Oh, Lothario rang me up about half past eight,” said Cornelia sweetly. “He isn’t coming.”
“Isn’t coming! Why, he promised to be my escort,” Mazie cried out in a harsh strident voice.
Mazie’s voice was not her strong point. Whenever she opened her pretty mouth, she shattered many illusions.
“Oh, he’s going to the ball. But he has changed his mind about coming here first. I suppose he doesn’t want any of you to know him by his costume.”
Mazie’s irritation was unbounded.
“None of our crowd are keeping each other in the dark,” she said. “What’s struck him? There’ll be plenty of strangers to play the devil with. If Claude has backed out, who’s to take us, old girl?”
“Well, Robert’s here.”
“Robert! He can’t keep Hutchins Burley from persecuting me.”
“Or you from persecuting Hutchins Burley.”
“Don’t be nasty, Cornelia,” said Mazie, jumping angrily down. “You take the cinnamon bun, anyway. Why didn’t you pipe up sooner with the news that Claude had rung up?”
“I quite forgot to,” said her friend, calmly.
“Forgot to!” said Mazie, not concealing either her incredulity or her vexation. “A fat lot you did. It’s your spite. Your refusing to come to the ball is spite, too. Just spite. I suppose you think that since you can’t have Claude, nobody else shall have him, either.”
“I don’t think about Lothario at all,” said Cornelia, demurely placid, as she could afford to be in view of the infuriated state in which Mazie burst from the room.
The silence which had fallen on the scene during this conflict was soon broken, and gayety was gradually restored.
“Who is Lothario?” asked Janet, recovering her spirits more slowly than the others.
“That’s Claude Fontaine, the son of Fontaine the jeweler. You know Fontaine’s, the big jewelry and art establishment on Fifth Avenue?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Well, he’s that Fontaine. Very good looking as well as very rich. All the Lorillard girls are dippy about him. So am I. And so will you be.”
“Do you think so?” asked Janet, hopefully, for she was thirsting for any new experience.
“I’m sure of it. But I hope you won’t dream of marrying Lothario. Chiefly for the reason that it would be useless. He comes here too well armed and well seasoned against matrimonial schemes.”
She added that, in spite of this obvious fact, nearly all the Lorillard girls of the Outlaw brand had their caps set at the young millionaire.
“On principle, they’re all opposed to marriage,” she proceeded. “But they’re all ready to sacrifice this principle in such a very profitable cause.”
This bitter remark was the first hint Janet received of a cleavage between Cornelia’s theories and the theories or practices of the other model tenementers.
“And Mazie wants to marry him, too?” she asked.
“Marry him?—Well, get him,” answered Cornelia languidly. “Mazie has the mating instincts of a pussy cat and the brains of a pigeon. Hello, where’s Robert?” she added, missing him. “He slips away the moment one’s eyes are taken off him.”
As if in answer to her call, Robert came back, bringing Mazie in tow. Shortly after her wrathful exit, he had unobtrusively gone out to smooth down her ruffled feelings. An explosion of Mazie’s temper was like the backfire of a motor car; there was a loud report and much smoke, but no damage done or permanent hard feeling caused—at least, not to herself. Thus, a good dose of flattery, which Robert skillfully administered, had set her going equably again; for, besides being dependent on Cornelia, Mazie was too much occupied with the satisfaction of her desires to prolong a quarrel in support of her rights.
A symphony of cooings re-established peace and good will amongst the three young ladies; and these dulcet sounds blended easily with the mirth of the other masqueraders in the flat. In an access of joy, Mazie took Janet romping through the rooms. Robert used this occasion to whisper in Cornelia’s ear:
“I satisfied Mazie that you weren’t staying home to meet Claude, by convincing her that you had an engagement with me,” he said.
“Have I?” She tried to hide her pleasure, immense as it was.
“I hope so,” he replied, using far less tact with her than he had with Mazie. “These entertainments don’t interest me at all. And, as I’m pledged to bring the girls home, it will be much more fun to spend the interval chatting with you than being bored at the ball.”
Cornelia’s face fell. With admirable self-control she said she meant to stay up for the girls, and would be glad of his company, though he might feel free to change his mind if he chose.
Janet now detached herself from Mazie, put her arm through Robert’s, and begged him to hasten and join the merry-makers who were already filing out. This was her first ball, anticipation had cast a glamor over everything that was or was to be, and excitement had set all her nerves a tingle.
There was a last concerted effort to dissuade Cornelia from remaining alone. It was unsuccessful.
Then Janet drew Robert through the doorway and, as she joined the procession of celebrants, her heightened senses quite transfigured her. This fact was not lost on Cornelia or Mazie.
“What a pretty pair!” said the latter mockingly. “Just watch them doing that snappy stuff with the eyes.”
Mazie had stayed behind for a moment to give Cornelia a parting shot.
“You’d better change your mind, Corny. A swell chance there is of Robert coming back here now that Janet’s got him hooked. Come along, dearie, do. See here, I’ll give you a tip. You can rile a good many more people by going to the ball than you can by staying here.”
Cornelia shook her head disdainfully at this satire on her motives. Yet disdain was not her strongest emotion, Mazie’s shaft having struck too deep for an answer.
III
Towards midnight, the Outlaws’ Ball in the old Murray Hill Lyceum on 34th Street had almost hit its stride. Two bands, an Hawaiian Jazz and the Kips Bay Roughnecks, furnished the music, and what with the crash and blare of instruments, the dazzle of costumes, the clouds of confetti, and the swirl of dancers, masked and unmasked, the dense motley crowd appeared to be squeezing the last ounce of pleasure out of its mad adventure in search of “a good time.”
Janet’s appearance in her Spanish robes with the genuine Castilian mantilla, the high tortoise shell comb, and the silk Andalusian shawl flaming brilliantly against her dark hair, was one of the sensations of the evening. Robert’s somber monk’s cowl at her side subtracted nothing from this sensation. He conducted her through the mazes of the upper dancing floor and then brought her back to the gorgeous gypsy tent that had been set up on the floor below.
There she began to play the gypsy fortune teller with as much subtlety as the professional exertions of the musical Roughnecks permitted.
Robert stood near the tent as a sort of self-constituted watchman and bodyguard extraordinary. As John Barleycorn was being liberally dispensed in the refreshment room, a number of tipsy masqueraders soon turned up, and some of these roistered into Janet’s tent despite Robert’s efforts to fend them off.
Hutchins Burley was among those who presently appeared on the scene. It was after Mazie Ross had repeatedly toyed with his erotic instincts and incited his hot pursuit only to defeat him at a point just short of possession. In a fury of frustration, he had descended to the first floor to inflame his passions further at the public bar. Thus inspirited, he propelled his Falstaffian proportions into the gypsy tent and requested Janet to read his palm.
His breath alone would have decided Janet to refuse. But when he interrupted her first sentence by tearing off her mask and importuning a closer acquaintance with the face behind it, she pushed abruptly past him and, running outside the tent, waited for him to leave it.
With surprising alacrity Hutchins Burley bundled after her.
“You’re a lively little kipper,” he shouted, filled with liquor and desire. And he wildly reached out one arm to clasp her around the waist. But Janet, uttering a low cry, dodged and slipped past him, while Burley’s flopping arms were caught firmly by two men who had sprung forward for this purpose.
One of these was Robert. The other was a tall, unobtrusive man who had quietly but deftly detached himself from the throng.
The attention of several people had been arrested by Janet’s cry and flight, and these now pressed forward to learn what the trouble was. A confusion of queries, blusterings and exclamations followed, during which the Roughnecks struck up the “Nobody Home” rag.
Hutchins Burley had recovered some of his wits under the compulsion of several menacing faces around him. Seeing him become tractable, Robert contemptuously flung off the arm he held and walked away towards Janet. Burley followed his receding steps with a malevolent glare, and then turned savagely on the tall quiet stranger who was still holding his other arm in a grip of steel.
“Leggo my arm,” he bellowed.
“A word in your ear, Mr. Burley,” said the quiet one, relaxing his grip. “Plain clothes men are in the crowd. If you kick up a shindy, you’ll be giving them what they’re looking for.”
“And who the devil are you?” sputtered Burley, with the air of a man who is not to be easily frightened.
“Oh, nobody in particular,” said the quiet man in a low voice. And, before he could be questioned further, he had melted unobtrusively into the crowd.
IV
A little later, Robert led three jovial young maskers into the gypsy tent. The foremost was dressed as Charles Surface and had quite enough gay confidence to do justice to the part.
“So here’s the Outlaws’ piece of resistance,” he called out merrily. “We’ll see whether she can do half as much justice to my palm as to her lovely gypsy shawl.”
He sat down at Janet’s little table and held out his hand. She took it, examined it gravely for some seconds, and then, in her fine clarinet tones she reported swiftly, without a pause, and getting almost breathless towards the end:
“You are handsome, graceful, false and cruel. You’ve been a good soldier, but you’ll become a poor poet. I see you divided into three parts: part one—Charles Surface; part two—Joseph Surface; part three—Sir Peter Teazle. What a pity your name isn’t Henry! For you are as dashing as Henry the Fifth, as amorous as Henry of Navarre, and as kind to women as Henry the Eighth. You will be married twice, but how many hearts you will break I dare not reveal. Your own heart is a safe deposit vault, fireproof and loveproof both. Hapless and witless damsels without number will try to blow it up or melt it—without success. One girl alone will refrain from the attempt, realizing the utter uselessness of piercing this too, too solid flesh—”
“Here,” cried the young man, drawing away his hand, the laughter and jibing endorsements with which his comrades greeted the several revelations, proving too much for him. “I don’t call this a fortune: I call it a raw deal.”
“No use abusing the cards,” said Janet, still affecting the utmost gravity. “The cards never lie.”
“Oh, don’t they, Miss Gypsy? That’s where your professional prejudice blinds you. Take your discovery that I’m a poor poet, for instance. Well, the fact is, I’m no poet at all. I never so much as wrote a couplet to a girl in all my life.”
“I said: you will become a poet,” remarked Janet, gently correcting him.
“And when will that be, pray?”
Janet hastily cut the cards anew, dealt out five cards, and held out the Queen of Spades to the onlookers.
“When a dark lady enters your life,” she said.
“A dark lady has entered my life,” he said, his voice vibrating seductively. “Entered it with a very poor opinion of me, it seems. But I shouldn’t call her the Queen of Spades. I should call her Janet, the Queen of Clubs.”
“Clubs, because I scored so many good hits?”
“No, because a Queen of Spades must have lustrous black eyes, and yours are heavenly gray. Come, let’s unmask, and see who’s the better fortune teller of the two.”
Claude pulled off his mask and stood, handsome and challenging, waiting for her to follow suit.
He was very good to look upon. Handsome, graceful and proud, there was just enough disdain in his perfect manner to make every woman adore him and long to enslave his flawless form. He had wonderful blue eyes, a delicate mouth, a fine nose and a penetrating sympathetic voice. Great ease, great daring and great energy of animal passion gave him a hundred opportunities to show his fine points to excellent advantage. To qualities that almost made riches superfluous, riches were added. No wonder he seemed to be a darling of the gods.
Janet’s pulse was distinctly quickened by the telling exterior of this dazzling young man. And when she unfastened her domino and met his glance with her fearless gray eyes, his thrilling moment came. He was not greatly impressed with her looks, his social training having biased him towards more fashionable types of beauty. Yet a magnetic ecstacy set him on fire and sent rapturous messages throbbing along his nerves.
It was an enthralling moment, one that seemed mysteriously to link up his being with other blissful moments in previous existences. Strange! Each time that he experienced this emotion anew, he was sure it was unique, sure it was not in this life that he had experienced it before. Stranger still, though it was as deep as the full flooded river of life itself, it was as transitory as an electric spark or a flash of lightning. The moment was poignant, intoxicating, miraculous; yet by no fraction of an instant could it be prolonged.
Indeed, within a second or two, Claude and Janet were chatting about a good many matters which did not bear in the remotest way upon this magnetizing spark. Still, they chatted with an excited recklessness, and as if their essences were held together by a subtle force, a force whose irresistible urgency they would neither have dared to acknowledge nor wished to dispute.
V
Steeped in the enjoyment of the moment, Janet hardly noticed that Robert had tacitly resigned his watchful care of her to Claude Fontaine. She began to neglect her fortune telling duties as one result of this displacement, for Claude’s appropriation of her time grew as his visits became more frequent. Nor did he share her compunction on this score. Far from doing so, he cajoled her into dancing with him again and again. In the intervals, he escorted her from one end of the reception floor to the other, introducing her to the groups he considered worth while. Thus she shared (much more fully than she desired to) the curiosity which his brilliant presence excited and the gossip which it was everywhere a signal for.
“Here’s an interesting stunt,” said Claude to his partner.
He indicated a group of young people amongst whom she instantly recognized Robert and Mazie. Two others claimed her attention. In the center of the group was a young woman with a high color and a very energetic manner, who had adopted an unusual plan for swelling the box office receipts. She was making impromptu busts in putty of all who could afford a contribution, no reasonable sum being refused.
When Claude and Janet came up, the sculptress had just finished modelling a head of Robert; and a remarkably spirited likeness it was. Robert was greatly taken with it, but his satisfaction was mild beside that of the artist, who handled the fragile image as though it were the apple of her eye.
Two thoughts struck Janet. One was that Charlotte Beecher’s fuss over the statuette of Robert Lloyd was excessive. The other was that she now, for the first time, missed the living model. But this discovery, as well as her criticism of the sculptress, was promptly swallowed up in the kaleidoscopic whirl of meeting still other characters belonging to the strange new society into which she had been flung.
Nevertheless, she contrived to recall Robert to her side.
“What a wonderful head Robert has!” Miss Beecher was rhapsodizing, while she glanced sentimentally from the statue to the living model. “I declare, it’s all brain.”
“It sure is!” echoed Mazie, mockingly. “But it’s not a patch on his wonderful heart.”
She laid her hand on the spot where she supposed this organ to be, and added, without crediting the epigram to Cornelia who had originated it:
“That’s all brain, too!”
Everybody laughed, Robert no less heartily than his neighbors. Everybody, that is, save Charlotte Beecher, whose sharp glance at Mazie softened to tenderness as it swept on towards Robert.
The second person to fascinate Janet was a youngish woman in a Syrian dress of many boldly brilliant color clashes. Contrasts as startling were achieved by her coal black hair, her pale olive skin, and the gorgeous green pendants attached to her ears. She had the barbaric picturesqueness of a White African Queen straight out of Rider Haggard, and about as much credibility. But she posed with unlimited self-confidence.
So speculated Janet. The next moment she reminded herself of the necessity of keeping an eye (and perhaps a string) on Robert Lloyd.
But he was nowhere to be seen. In his usual insidious fashion, he had taken French leave while the circle of spectators was absorbed in the ritual of weaving gossip amongst themselves or blessing Miss Beecher’s next putty statuette with lavish adjectives and exclamations.
His disappearance piqued Janet. But the exhilaration caused by all the enchantments of the ball and all the thrills of Claude’s gallantry and charm, did not permit her to allow any one emotion more than a fleeting hospitality.
Claude watched his chance of enticing her to another novelty. On the way, she begged him to enlighten her about the people she had just met.
“Tell me all about the sculptress and about the Rider Haggard lady with the earrings,” she said.
Claude explained that these ladies were both considered freaks even among the Outlaws: Charlotte Beecher, because she was an heiress who wore a working girl’s clothes and toiled harder with the sculptor’s chisel than a day laborer with a pickaxe; Lydia Morrow, not so much because she had a flair for spectacular dresses, Leon Bakst colors and startling jewelry, as because her authorship of half a dozen best sellers had given her almost unlimited means to gratify these vagaries.
“Lydia Morrow? I don’t seem to know the name,” said Janet.
“Lydia Dyson, her maiden name, is the name she writes under.”
This name Janet knew well enough. It was a familiar name wherever American magazines flourished; even among the Barrs of Brooklyn it was a household fixture. The stupendous fact was that Lydia Dyson’s novels of approximated naughtiness, sensual slush and disembowelled passion, appeared serially and simultaneously in magazines with as different a clientele as the Saturday Morning Post, the Purple Book, Anybody’s and the Women’s Bazaar.
Claude added that he had his own reasons for calling the two young women freaks.
“All these people are loony on the subject of love,” he said, with a wave of the hand that appeared to include the whole membership of the ball. “Some because they’ve had too much of it, but more because they’ve had too little. Mazie is one of a small group that is suffering from surfeit. But Charlotte and Lydia belong to the other class. Charlotte wants a husband without a whole lot of love, and Lydia wants a whole lot of love without a husband. As for Mazie, there’s nothing left for her to want but a rich protector, with as little love in the bargain as possible.”
This offhand analysis set Janet to wondering what Claude’s own conception of love might be. He went blithely on:
“The difficulty with Charlotte is that she’s too particular; with Lydia, that she’s not particular enough. Not one-tenth particular enough for Gordon Morrow, her husband, who lives on her money but won’t be kept in his place. He actually presumes to be furiously jealous. But, however comic a figure he may cut, who can blame him for drawing the line at a blackguard like Hutchins Burley? Here’s Hutch staggering this way, now. After you, the impudent beggar!”
Naturally, in this quarter, Burley had little luck. Janet shrank away from him, and Claude froze him off as he had already done two or three times that night. Envenomed, but nothing daunted, Hutchins Burley careered, none too steadily, over to the circle around the sculptress. Claude watched him disgustedly.
“If Morrow catches him pawing all over his wife, there’ll be trouble. And Lydia Dyson’s not the woman to lift her little finger to avert it. She has a theory that ‘Big Burley’ is a sort of twentieth century edition of the Cave Man, a theory she is not above putting to the proof. Husband or no husband, a big scene is nectar and ambrosia to her.”
He looked anxiously back at Charlotte Beecher’s group. “Let’s go away from here,” he said, taking her arm with protective tenderness.
“Shall we go back to the tent?”
“I’d like to take you much further than that. You are too wonderful and genuine to fit into this hothouse crowd.”
Janet liked his pretty speeches, but she had not yet had her fill of the carnival of pleasure.
Claude’s fears were only too speedily realized. Hardly had he returned Janet to her gypsy tent, than shouts and screams ascended from the sculptress’ quarter. Claude hastened to the spot and found two knots of men pulling Burley away from Lydia’s husband and heightening the disorder in the act.
The commotion now took a new turn. Burley had not forgotten the man who had cold-shouldered him out of Janet’s way several times. As soon as he laid eyes on Claude and observed him assisting Charlotte Beecher in a feverish effort to save her putty models, his rage reached its climax. Every ounce of his bulky weight was put into a titanic pull that jerked him loose from those who restrained him. Using his momentary freedom to snatch up the little bust of Robert, he flung it at Claude’s head.
“No diamond shark can come butting in here,” he shouted, in a purple fury.
The bust went far wide of its mark. But not the taunt. It stung Claude into sudden violence, so that he sprang towards Burley with the object of thrashing him. Thirty or forty people having now been drawn into the melee, however, he was saved the ignominy of a public brawl.
At the height of the turmoil Claude’s arm was clasped by an iron hand. It was the hand of a tall immaculate man who spoke to him in a low calm voice.
“A word of warning, Mr. Fontaine,” he said, urging him away from the fracas. “Get your friends out of here at once! Detectives are about to raid the place.”
“Detectives! Are you one?” asked Claude, more or less bewildered.
“No, not particularly,” was the whimsical reply of the stranger, who then moved decisively away and evaporated as suddenly as he had turned up.
As soon as Claude rallied his wits, he acted swiftly. He persuaded Charlotte Beecher, who happened to be near, to follow him; and then took the shortest cut to the gypsy tent, where Janet greeted his return with a happy cry of relief. Excitedly he warned her of the raid, and urged her to lose no time in preparing to leave with him.
She obeyed, not without a pang of regret.
Regret? It was not parting with the musical Roughnecks, though they were better than their names; it was not turning her back on the dancing, though this had intoxicated her; and it was not saying farewell to the riot of color, costume and confetti, though these had put her in an ecstacy of delight. At least, it was not an extravagant hunger for these pleasures. And she certainly had nothing but measureless disgust for a crowd of brawling, shouting, turbulent men.
Why regret then?
It was merely because of the obvious difference between her joyless home and this night’s experience. Beside the deathlike stagnation of the Barrs of Brooklyn, the movement, intensity and go of the Outlaws had what she cheerfully accepted as the quality and flavor of reality. “This is life,” a still, small voice cried within her, meaning that this was at least a fairly good imitation of life on its gayer side. And she revelled unblushingly in the enchantment that her ignorance of pleasure and her natural high spirits had cast around Kips Bay, the model tenements, Cornelia, Robert and Claude.
Ah yes, and Claude! With Claude at her side she doubted whether she should mind even a raid. Indeed, wouldn’t it be rather fun to be caught in one? And so, while Claude was preoccupied with piloting his charges to safety, Janet half hoped that she might not be cheated of a practical answer to her question.
VI
Meanwhile the quiet stranger had contrived to get into one of the twisting, struggling whirlpools of men in the fracas, and to insinuate his immaculate person next to Hutchins Burley.
“Have a care,” he said, in Burley’s ear. “In another minute this rough-house will be cleaned up by plain-clothes men.
“Who in hell are you?” yelled Burley, none too pleased with the features of the man who had warned him before.
“Why, nobody in particular,” answered the stranger coolly, and beginning to edge rapidly away. Burley tramped after him, his befuddled wits somewhat cleared by the recent pummelling.
“Then how the devil did you spot the cops?” he said, ploughing his way ruthlessly through human obstructions. “Do they whisper the secrets in your beautiful ears?”
“Oh, secrets are always coming my way,” was the nonchalant answer.
The mysterious one halted as soon as he had put several yards between himself and the mob. Cool and self-contained, he was a striking contrast to Hutchins Burley as the latter, dishevelled, muttering and out of breath, bore down upon him.
“Mr. Burley, you’d better go, while the going’s good! Here’s an emergency exit. Good night. I’ll look you up in the morning.”
While the stranger’s unobtrusive figure merged into the environment, Burley took the hint with loud Falstaffian clatter. He had barely passed through the door, when the lights went out and the raid actually began.